(Adam McKay, 2015)
It starts out all Goodfellas-by-way-of-amped-up-1990s-Oliver Stone; rapid changes in film stock, music pumping, loads of voiceover, exposition but delivered with wit and gags and style; angry and exhilarated and loud and energetic.
Thats lasts about 15-20 minutes, and then The Big Short settles into what it actually is: a sort of real life financial heist story. Oh, every so often McKay throws in a little splash of post-modernism - here's Selena Gomez or Margot Robbie or Anthony Bourdain, as themselves, explaining some complex financial concept in layman's terms, here's Ryan Gosling's narrator figure addressing the camera - but mainly it stays on the straight and narrow, and just tells its story.
Luckily that story is inherently interesting. How the global financial crash came about is just one more story beat here; and when Steve Carrell's Mark Baum realises what is about to happen and is sent reeling away from a restaurant, stunned by the knowledge, The Big Short reaches a nice pitch of hysterical black comedy and sober despair at what was allowed to happen. His character has his own Fund, and he and his team bet wildly against the housing market at the behest of Gosling's slick trader Jared Vennett. They have been beaten to the punch by oddball genius hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who defies all his clients and incurs at least one lawsuit by doing the same thing a year or so earlier. Then there are the two small town traders who happen across this deal and, aided by their ex-Wall Street Hotshot neighbour Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) buy into the same game.
From then on, its just a waiting game, and McKay conjures impressive tension, considering the fact that we all know what eventually happens.
In the interim McKay shows his characters shock at just how rigged and corrupt the banking industry in the USA was back then, but always keeps the actions and locations varied - Wall Street is prominent, but his characters visit Miami condos, Vegas casinos, Devon Pubs and lap-dancing clubs along the way. Even if the humour is pitch black, he drops the odd bombshell of realism to shock the audience: Pitt chiding his young proteges by recounting the human cost of what will happen being perhaps the highlight.
The starry cast makes it all that much more painless. Gosling can play smug and slick in his sleep, Carrell makes Baum's emotional implosion not only queasy but touching, Pitt is convincingly eccentric, and Bale steals the film with his surges of energy (soundtracked to heavy metal drumming) and inability to socially connect.
McKay keeps it busy and colourful, and ends on a nice note of triumph for his heroes, but defeat for his country, which is probably as it should be, with this story.
Showing posts with label Rafe Spall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rafe Spall. Show all posts
Thursday, 7 January 2016
Sunday, 24 February 2013
I GIVE IT A YEAR
(Dan Mazer, 2013)
A couple of things about I Give It a Year make sense as soon as you realise that writer-director Dan Mazer is best-known as Sacha Baron-Cohen's co-writer on Ali G, Bruno and Borat. The way the laughter isn't really spread throughout the film but comes in sharp little spikes, for one thing. Mazer is great at constructing comic set-pieces that gather momentum and grow funnier as they go on; he is great, in other words, at writing sketches. And so this film is full of them; neat, almost perfectly-formed scenes based around a single, hilarious comic conceit, which the film then pushes as far as it can go. Take the scene where Chloe (Anna Faris) is involved in a threesome with two of her co-workers at a charity and it turns into a wrestling match studded with excrutiating dirty talk, brilliantly played by the actress as a piece of sustained, undignified, unsexy slapstick. Or the scene where Josh (Rafe Spall) attempts to pantomime his way through "Dr Quinn Medicine Woman" in a game of charades by referring to the word "quim" and relentlessly pointing at his mother-in-law and her mother's genitals.
Another thing is the way Mazer introduces a host of brilliant, classically British comic grotesques - generally caricatures - as fleeting supporting characters. Olivia Coleman, for instance, is dazzling as a deranged marriage counsellor. Likewise, Stephen Merchant steals every scene he's in as Josh's best friend Dan, unable to stop himself rabbiting on about anything inappropriate that enters his head.
This is all overlaid atop what is quite a generic romantic comedy setting and storyline:
in a London of cute pedestrian streets, hip bars and cool restaurants, Josh and Nat (Rose Byrne) struggle with their first year of married life, having tied the knot only seven months after meeting. Their differences seem daily more relevant and they are both tempted to stray - Josh by his girl-next-door ex Chloe, Nat by the suave Guy (Simon Baker). Their problems are only magnified by their friends and families, especially Nat's sister Naomi (Minnie Driver), happily miserable with her husband (Jason Flemyng).
Mazer dusts off a series of ancient "men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" observations about the sexes (he leaves the seat up and makes lame jokes, she gets song lyrics wrong and hates his family) and his film is curiously unbalanced. While Josh is a bit of a pratt, his side of the story involves a sympathetic, touching relationship with Chloe, genuinely the one who got away, and their mutual affection and shared sense of humour, together with warm performances from Faris and Spall, makes the audience root for them to get together. That's in sharp contrast with Nat and Guy, who are both beautiful but a little humourless, and whose relationship - played out in corporate spaces, plush hotel suites and factory floors as coldly, superficially slick and smug as their characters - is meant to be based upon a chemistry absent between the two actors.
Like most romantic comedies, the soundtrack here is full of pop songs, only in this case many of them are awful covers of songs which only make you think: Damn, I wish they'd used the original version here...
But Mazer's sensibility is sharper than that evident in the majority of films in this genre, there are some big laughs here, the cast is generally excellent, and it is all nicely paced. Mazer obviously understands the pitfalls of the romcom, and while he avoids most of them, it proves beyond him to avoid all, which is a bit of a shame.
A couple of things about I Give It a Year make sense as soon as you realise that writer-director Dan Mazer is best-known as Sacha Baron-Cohen's co-writer on Ali G, Bruno and Borat. The way the laughter isn't really spread throughout the film but comes in sharp little spikes, for one thing. Mazer is great at constructing comic set-pieces that gather momentum and grow funnier as they go on; he is great, in other words, at writing sketches. And so this film is full of them; neat, almost perfectly-formed scenes based around a single, hilarious comic conceit, which the film then pushes as far as it can go. Take the scene where Chloe (Anna Faris) is involved in a threesome with two of her co-workers at a charity and it turns into a wrestling match studded with excrutiating dirty talk, brilliantly played by the actress as a piece of sustained, undignified, unsexy slapstick. Or the scene where Josh (Rafe Spall) attempts to pantomime his way through "Dr Quinn Medicine Woman" in a game of charades by referring to the word "quim" and relentlessly pointing at his mother-in-law and her mother's genitals.
Another thing is the way Mazer introduces a host of brilliant, classically British comic grotesques - generally caricatures - as fleeting supporting characters. Olivia Coleman, for instance, is dazzling as a deranged marriage counsellor. Likewise, Stephen Merchant steals every scene he's in as Josh's best friend Dan, unable to stop himself rabbiting on about anything inappropriate that enters his head.
This is all overlaid atop what is quite a generic romantic comedy setting and storyline:
in a London of cute pedestrian streets, hip bars and cool restaurants, Josh and Nat (Rose Byrne) struggle with their first year of married life, having tied the knot only seven months after meeting. Their differences seem daily more relevant and they are both tempted to stray - Josh by his girl-next-door ex Chloe, Nat by the suave Guy (Simon Baker). Their problems are only magnified by their friends and families, especially Nat's sister Naomi (Minnie Driver), happily miserable with her husband (Jason Flemyng).
Mazer dusts off a series of ancient "men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" observations about the sexes (he leaves the seat up and makes lame jokes, she gets song lyrics wrong and hates his family) and his film is curiously unbalanced. While Josh is a bit of a pratt, his side of the story involves a sympathetic, touching relationship with Chloe, genuinely the one who got away, and their mutual affection and shared sense of humour, together with warm performances from Faris and Spall, makes the audience root for them to get together. That's in sharp contrast with Nat and Guy, who are both beautiful but a little humourless, and whose relationship - played out in corporate spaces, plush hotel suites and factory floors as coldly, superficially slick and smug as their characters - is meant to be based upon a chemistry absent between the two actors.
Like most romantic comedies, the soundtrack here is full of pop songs, only in this case many of them are awful covers of songs which only make you think: Damn, I wish they'd used the original version here...
But Mazer's sensibility is sharper than that evident in the majority of films in this genre, there are some big laughs here, the cast is generally excellent, and it is all nicely paced. Mazer obviously understands the pitfalls of the romcom, and while he avoids most of them, it proves beyond him to avoid all, which is a bit of a shame.
Tuesday, 8 January 2013
LIFE OF PI
(Ang Lee, 2012)
There are breathtaking moments in this film; Ang Lee remains capable of that much.
Mostly these moments are purely visual. If, in his best work, this filmmaker has shown the capacity to unite visual poetry with a narrative complexity and interesting characters, here the pseudo-spiritualism of the oversimplified story (for which we can blame the author of the source novel, Yann Martel) defeats him to some degree.
The first act of Life of Pi is a series of parable-like vignettes of the title characters boyhood in India, the lessons he learns, the ways in which he grows. He has a stern but loving father, a mocking older brother, and a saintly, beautiful mother. He falls in love with a lovely girl. The world is colourful, exotic, interesting, eternally romantic. Then he and his family move their zoo across the Pacific to Canada, the ship they are sailing in sinks, and Pi is shipwrecked, alone on a life-raft with a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker. The rest of the film chronicles their battle for survival.
Lee remains a classy and gifted visual storyteller, and it is testament to those gifts that despite the cardboard characters and the ridiculous situation, Life of Pi is never actually boring. Indeed, the survival passages are quite gripping inbetween the many moments when he opts for sheer lush visual splendour, indulging in a series of sequences that look like they have come from a screensaver - the still ocean reflecting the orange sky above, luminescent jellyfish glowing around a gleaming whale at night, seas of meerkats, Pi watching the liner sink to the ocean floor from beneath the churning waves. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda does some fine work here, and he and Lee also combine for some inventive 3D shots throughout.
But none of that is enough for me, not from a director capable of so much more. I understand the attraction here and see the way the new-agey simplicity of the story can gain power until it is truly moving; to some. But for me, Lee has abandoned complexity and nuance here in favour of spectacle and a gooey glob of pure emotion, when previously I had always credited him with enough craft and intelligence to be able to carry off both. A shame.
There are breathtaking moments in this film; Ang Lee remains capable of that much.
Mostly these moments are purely visual. If, in his best work, this filmmaker has shown the capacity to unite visual poetry with a narrative complexity and interesting characters, here the pseudo-spiritualism of the oversimplified story (for which we can blame the author of the source novel, Yann Martel) defeats him to some degree.
The first act of Life of Pi is a series of parable-like vignettes of the title characters boyhood in India, the lessons he learns, the ways in which he grows. He has a stern but loving father, a mocking older brother, and a saintly, beautiful mother. He falls in love with a lovely girl. The world is colourful, exotic, interesting, eternally romantic. Then he and his family move their zoo across the Pacific to Canada, the ship they are sailing in sinks, and Pi is shipwrecked, alone on a life-raft with a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker. The rest of the film chronicles their battle for survival.
Lee remains a classy and gifted visual storyteller, and it is testament to those gifts that despite the cardboard characters and the ridiculous situation, Life of Pi is never actually boring. Indeed, the survival passages are quite gripping inbetween the many moments when he opts for sheer lush visual splendour, indulging in a series of sequences that look like they have come from a screensaver - the still ocean reflecting the orange sky above, luminescent jellyfish glowing around a gleaming whale at night, seas of meerkats, Pi watching the liner sink to the ocean floor from beneath the churning waves. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda does some fine work here, and he and Lee also combine for some inventive 3D shots throughout.
But none of that is enough for me, not from a director capable of so much more. I understand the attraction here and see the way the new-agey simplicity of the story can gain power until it is truly moving; to some. But for me, Lee has abandoned complexity and nuance here in favour of spectacle and a gooey glob of pure emotion, when previously I had always credited him with enough craft and intelligence to be able to carry off both. A shame.
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